The East European Socialist/Post-socialist City as a Comparative Endeavor

Abstract

Eastern Europe has been portrayed as the West’s undeveloped “other” since the French Enlightenment. In this brief debate article, I argue that Eastern Europe’s marginalization has only been augmented, even if inadvertently so, in scholarly debates on the “socialist city” and the “post-socialist city.” Explicitly or implicitly, both debates use Western cities as a “natural” point of comparison and as examples of a more advanced type of urbanism. This approach has led to systematic underappreciation of the specific and sometimes very positive aspects of East European urbanism. The article calls for a different approach in which East European cities are studied on their own terms, rather than in perpetual comparative dependency on their Western counterparts.